~:~ Barely Human ~:~

~:~ Chapter 1 - A new life ~:~

~ A new life - Is what his father would call it every time they were travelling down the highway at forty miles an hour with a trunk load of their belongings and stat-icky music bleating from their beaten up radio.

A new town. Full of new faces and places and things. A new terrain to explore and to come to despise all the same until the moment they moved away again. What was there to be excited about? Moving to someplace new wasn't something Keith was unaccustomed to. This would be just like all the other times. His father gets a business deal and then the family is packing their unpacked boxes into the moving truck again and setting destination for the next shit hole to suffer in.

There was no way this time would be different. Right? That's what Keith always told himself anyway. Don't look forward to anything because it's not worth it. He knows the process thorough and through, it's engraved in his brain. Practically second nature. Get through however much time they'll be spending here and then move on to do it all over again. It's just how his life went.

Why couldn't it be different? He wished it were. With different people and different circumstances. But obviously what Keith wanted wasn't something fate would give him. He just wanted to be a normal kid, growing up in a normal neighborhood with normal friends.

But that's not possible for someone like Keith, the epiphany of 'abnormal'.

"Alright everyone, ready to start fresh and anew?" His father chirps as he claps his hands together. Keith rolls his eyes, pulls his hood up over his head and kicks the door open. He's lost count of how many times he's heard the man say those same words. His brother and mother following his lead as they pop the trunk and begin to unload.

In the meantime Keith comes to face and paint peeling halfway house that just screams 'bomb site' or even 'bong site' works too since it seems uncannily like a drug dealers home. Long, dry, prickly grass. A fruit tree that looks burnt and dead in the front yard. Nothing but a charred black collection of eerie arms reaching out from hell itself. The beige picket fence Keith assumed was once a cloudy white color was falling apart and the mail box wasn't even on its fucking post.

Keith was used to seeing the house he'd be living in in this sort of state. But shit - this was a literal pile of trash. He sighed to himself and hopped up the steps to the porch. A couch, worn and withered sat resting against the wall. Keith imagined that would be a place he'd find himself hanging out at a lot whilst he was here, so long as he never found out something had died on it.

The windows were each covered with a broken fly screen, torn from its frame and a doorbell on the doorframe was lathered in old, dusty spider webs. Keith cringes. He turns around to look back towards the street. As far as he could see the other houses in the neighborhood weren't looking all that more spick and span. Better but not much. The street was pretty much dead still. Not a person, not a car. Somewhere in the distance a dog was barking like a maniac and the sounds of a motor bike was roaring down the freeway.

"Well isn't this just-" Shiro, his brother, began before his foot got caught in the fence gate and the whole thing snaps clean off its hinges. He stumbles, yelps and kicks it away, dusting his hands off on his jumper as he looks around, trying to play it off like it didn't happen. Keith, unamused, raises a brow at him.

"- charming?" Keith finishes for him. Shiro smirks and shrugs his shoulders.

"I was gonna say something along the lines of ruinous, miserable, demoralizing but charming works too." He says as he makes his way up the steps, ruffles his little brothers hair and unlocks the front door. The first thing that comes to mind when Keith walks into the house behind his brother is old. The place smelt like aged leather and china pieces, obviously an old lady had lived and probably died here a while ago.